Saleen S7

From Mulsanne to Main Street, Saleen's all-American S7 supercar is now available.

There's something great about having 550 horsepower just behind your right shoulder. But a flat torque curve is part of the package with Steve Saleen's S7 supercar, too, and as we hurtled down the relatively short straights of Foxen Canyon near Santa Barbara, we could feel the intensity that only a 7.0-liter aluminum V-8 with 525 pound-feet of torque can provide.

The fact that the engine has to push only about 3000 pounds of car and cargo down the road makes the sensations that much more vivid. This S7 was one of the long-awaited street-legal versions of Saleen's Le Mans race car: a carbon-fiber-wrapped tube-frame missile with race-derived components at every turn.

Seen at curbside, the Saleen S7 is a big car. It is more than six and a half feet wide and 15 and a half feet long. The low silhouette helps emphasize that length and width, and the resemblance to contemporary sports-racing cars is obvious to any onlooker. Even if it weren't, the lusty noises at startup send an unmistakable message about the car's potential. Big, bad, and gruff, the 7.0-liter fires sounds out of its four tailpipes that reverberate with angry determination.

The S7 attracts onlookers like a free-money stand, and small crowds are soon peering through the windows. What they see through the low rear window is a giant snorkel directing air from a roof scoop to a huge air filter that feeds dual throttle bodies. Below that are the brawny shoulders of a big-lung V-8 based on Ford architecture but essentially remanufactured in every respect. The block shares Ford bore centers and deck dimensions, but it's a custom casting from a foundry in Los Angeles, custom-machined for its new duties in the S7.

The cylinder heads, too, are alloy castings CNC-machined to Saleen's specs. Fed by an aluminum intake manifold with eight separate runners, the engine has a forged steel crank, Manley rods, Arias pistons, and stainless-steel valves with titanium retainers and beryllium seats. The exhaust is made of stainless steel and incorporates dual catalysts for each cylinder bank.

The V-8 drives a reworked six-speed RBT transmission, putting the power to huge 13.0-by-20-inch HRE two-piece rear wheels via a gerotor-type limited-slip differential. Those wheels are shod with meaty 355/25ZR-20 Pirelli P Zero tires, with smaller 275/30ZR-19s on the front.

Designed by Phil Frank, the S7's bodywork has the profile of a Porsche GT1, the face of a Saleen Mustang turned werewolf under a full moon, and a rear end looking like an Acura NSX on steroids. Its skeleton is a chrome-moly tube frame, but its skin is pure carbon fiber, laid up and autoclaved by CTS in England. To ensure that the lustrous paint would stick, Saleen had the BASF company develop a coating that would stick to epoxy on one side, and paint on the other.

The interior has changed a lot since the S7 show car made the auto-salon circuit, and it now sports Lear seats swathed in Spinneybeck leather, interior surfaces covered in suede, with titanium-colored moldings and trim of a very much higher quality than the stuff seen inside earlier cars. The switchgear, too, now better befits a car at a breathtaking price verging on 400 grand.

Still, the racing bias shows clearly. Sit under the guillotine doors on the wide sill, swing your legs into the narrow footwell, then slide down into the seat. Despite the car's generous width, which ought to have provided ample foot space notwithstanding the wide wheels, the S7's race-spec aerodynamics include air ducts to relieve pressure in the front wheel wells. They leave about a 10-inch slot for your feet. Thus, we drove the car in our socks.

We then encountered motorsports priority No. 2: noise levels high enough to compete with speech and the modest sound system (selected, like the DVD-based navigation system, for its low weight).

The ride is pretty firm, as you might expect of a car capable of generating a claimed downforce equal to the car's weight at 160 mph. There's a skateboardlike clatteriness to the front end that one hopes will be gone when cars are delivered to buyers, but the ride motions are sternly curtailed, and the car rides as flat as a board. Suspension travel is so tightly controlled that the modest 4.5 inches of ground clearance proved adequate even on markedly undulating pavement.

The small, flat-bottomed steering wheel directs the nose with surgical precision, but it is also perhaps a tad too quick for a car with the turn-in responses of a shifter kart and may be geared down for production. Development engineer Bill Tally told us the S7 doesn't like front-wheel settings that have toe-in or even neutral toe, so the car runs slightly toed out.

That makes it a trifle darty in a straight line, where its wide tires translate bumps and shifts in road surface into steering inputs. But aim this car into a series of bends at speed, and the combination of grip, downforce, low mass, and a 40/60 fore-and-aft weight distribution will soon have you laughing like a lunatic. Add the extraordinary propulsion, and the lunacy might reach the $395,000 level. That huge number hasn't stopped a line forming to order one of perhaps 400 units.